


Little Deaths

by periferal



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Asphyxiation, Awkward Sexual Situations, Emotional Constipation, F/M, Grief, Guardian Biology, Mourning, Post-Forsaken, sad sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-17 22:33:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17569184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/periferal/pseuds/periferal
Summary: This is what mourning feels like, right?(Or, the many meanings of 'to die')





	Little Deaths

They stop holding their meetings in public.

              It won’t do for the other guardians to see them scream at each other; it won’t do for the other guardians to see Ikora sigh in frustration as Zavala pulls more and more guardians back from their tasks at the edge of the solar system; it won’t do, it won’t do, it won’t…

              Ikora screams, or maybe she wails, and slams her hands on the table. It doesn’t matter. What matters is Zavala stops talking.

              “You aren’t the only one who misses him,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper. “How can you not see that?”

              “You let them go,” Zavala says, after a long silence. “Every time they faced a baron, _you_ put them in danger.” He looks away from her, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. “If we had lost…”

              “We didn’t!” Ikora says. “And if they hadn’t, if they had listened to you, who knows what Uldren Sov would have done in his madness?”

              “What he already did.” He shakes his head. “This has been our flaw, Ikora. We think we can leave what the Traveler has left us. We think we can push humanity beyond its borders, defeat the forces of Darkness in their strongholds.”

              His hands are shaking.

              “They always do,” Ikora says. “The Guardian—they always win, eventually. They found their Light, Zavala, even after all was lost.”

              “But what happens the day they lose?” He walks towards Ikora. “What happens when their luck runs out? Cayde—”

              “They are not Cayde, Zavala!”

              “You seemed bent on letting them be!” He’s in Ikora’s face now. He towers over her, but all his anger is directed inwards, his shoulders hunched. “They are safest here, near the Traveler. We must keep the city safe; everything else is—”

              Ikora punches him square in the jaw. She’s not as fast as… she’s not the fastest guardian ever made but she’s faster than him, and they’re both on the ground, all of a sudden, she on top of him, her fingers jammed in his mouth. Childish, perhaps, but what does she know of _childhood_?

              “Shut up,” she says. She wonders, dimly, what Osiris would think if he saw her. “Shut up, shut up, _shut up_.” She notices that he isn’t fighting her; he’s closed his eyes, and she can see the threads of dark light pulse under his skin.

              Even guardians need to breathe, though they can get better from the lack of it, and following a dark instinct she cannot place, puts her other hand over his face and mouth.

              He could bite her hand clean through, if he so wanted (she can feel his teeth, his tongue, wet against her fingers), or push her off, but instead he only puts up a token resistance and she’s aware of his hands unclenching. He suffocates to death slowly, the lines on his face smoothing away as he relaxes into hypoxia. His eyes stop glowing and then shut. She can feel his last heartbeat, and she ends up on her knees, head bowed, as his body disappears.

              His ghost revives him immediately, glares at her, and then he’s standing in front of her.

              “Take off your armor,” she says. She doesn’t apologize. She wants to, but the words stick in her throat.

              “Excuse me?” Zavala sounds tired, which is all wrong. She’s just _killed_ him, and he took it like it was nothing. Of course, killing your friends is something you do when you’re a guardian, but only play, and she is uncertain whether he is her friend, and this was not play.

              “Take off your armor,” she repeats, unable to look up at him.

              “Ikora, look at me,” Zavala says. “Please.” He sounds tired.

              “Please,” Ikora says. She doesn’t look up.

              She’s almost certain he’s just going to walk out. She’s not being clear on what she’s offering, and he probably doesn’t want it.

              (What is _wanting_ when you’re an animate body? Cayde had _wanted_ more than either of them, in his strange way. Centuries, and Ikora still isn’t sure what Exo are, what it means for them to have a body.)

              Ikora looks up at the sound of armor hitting the ground. Titans wear so much of it.

              He wears plain grey underclothes. Cayde used to make fun of him, pointedly ignoring that Cayde himself wore nothing at all under his clothes; he didn’t need to, of course.

              Ikora pulls his underpants down just enough to get at his flaccid dick, palming at it mechanically. She’s never(?) done this with a non-guardian, barely done it with guardians, in the grand scheme of her life.

              “Why are you doing this?” he asks.

              “Repayment,” she asks, which is barely an answer. “Will you just take this, too?”

              It’s hard (the mental snort doesn’t sound like her voice, almost) to convince Zavala’s body that this is necessary, that filling this part of itself with blood is something worth doing. (Here, she thinks about guardians who let themselves be cut open, their bodies poked and prodded and put to death, again, again.)

              She doesn’t have hair for him to hold on to; he braces himself on the table behind them. He makes no sound as Ikora finally takes him in her mouth, bothering to guard her teeth. For reasons that are probably interesting to someone, guardians with penises do not produce semen at all, which means other cues for orgasm. (Anyone could walk in, and she cannot think about this now or the whole exercise will just feel even worse.)

              Zavala finally bucks into her mouth, once, when she squeezes the base of his cock with her hand; his passive control over himself breaks, finally, in short bursts and then all at once. This would be the part where Ikora would be swallowing something other than her own spit, presumably. She’s never done this with a non-guardian. Not one with this equipment, anyway. Instead, Zavala’s just soft, and Ikora pulls back, wiping the spit from her mouth.

              Ikora stays on her knees as she watches Zavala slowly put his armor back on. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have killed you.”

              “This doesn’t change my mind,” Zavala says. He sounds less sure of himself than he did when he was this close to shouting at her, but that doesn’t make what he says any less true.

              “I know,” Ikora says. “I know.”

              Ikora isn’t sure what she expects the results of that to be (more awkwardness, maybe, as though that were possible. A telling off by her ghost, maybe, but that’s a whole other problem) but it’s not Zavala knocking on the door to her apartment out in the city.

              (The Vanguard never sleeps, supposedly, but she’s had a lot more free time since Zavala took all the active Vanguard duties for himself. She could protest, but that would mean another argument, and they already have so many.)

              “Ikora,” he says, voice muffled by the door. She imagines him with his forehead against the metal. “Are you awake?”

              “The answer to that question is almost always yes,” she says. She puts down her tablet and stands up. “Why are you here, Zavala?”

              “I… feel bad,” he says.

              Ikora waves the door open; she finds him standing impassively in the doorway. He’s in a set of normal clothes, which is not uncommon but still throws her off whenever he does it.

              “About what?” Ikora asks. “You haven’t—”

              “If you say I have not done anything wrong, you would be lying,” he interrupts.

              He stays in the doorway.

              “Come in,” Ikora says. “If I wanted you elsewhere, I wouldn’t have opened the door.”

              They stare at each other.

              “I just… left,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

              “What else were you supposed to do?” Ikora asks.

              He doesn’t have an answer for a long moment. “Ask you what was wrong?”

              The question, and the earnestness with which he asks it, are both so unexpected that Ikora bursts out laughing. “If you don’t know what’s wrong with me, you really haven’t been paying attention,” she says, regaining control of herself.

              She’s not the most stoic of the ~~three~~ both of them, that would be Zavala, but even so she feels as though recently she has been the emotional equivalent of a raw wound, obvious and easily reopened.  

              (The Guardian has certainly noticed; they ask awkward, concerned questions, their ghost doing most of the talking. They have threatened to hurt Zavala more than once. She didn’t tell them that this would be redundant. She wonders if they’ve made him similar offers.)

              “I know you miss him,” Zavala says, echoing her words from earlier. “I just want to keep everyone safe. We’ve lost so many—” Before she can say anything, he cuts himself off, briefly, but visibly, irritated with himself. She supposes he’s just as tired of the circular argument as she is. “That was the first time you touched me since… since…” He cuts himself off. He can say it, he just doesn’t want to. Not then.

              “You haven’t exactly been approachable,” she says. “I’m not killing you again.”

              He opens his mouth, about to say something, then stops. Finally, he says, “I wasn’t talking about that.”

              “Oh.”

              “Please, can I—” He goes to touch her, then drops his hands.

              Ikora makes a frustrated noise from somewhere in her chest and kisses him, clutching at his clothes with her hands. He’s taller than her, but not by that much. She pushes her tongue in his mouth. He keeps his hands at his side.

              They used to do this, sometimes. Not this, exactly, this is awful, but something like it, something that felt good.

              (Cayde would watch, completely motionless for once. He was jealous, it seemed, of this aspect of their bodies. Strange, since he had presumably been built for war, not for this.)

              “I can take you in my mouth again,” Ikora says, pulling away just as Zavala finally brings a hand up to her back. “Or use my hands, or—”

              “No,” Zavala says. He starts working at the fastenings for her robes. “Your collar’s in the way.”

              “What…?”

              “I left,” he says. “Come on, help me get you undressed.”

              She’s only a little less naked than he is, out of her robe and boots and the rest, but she feels like she’s stripped more than that from herself.

              (He is the last person to have seen her completely naked, him and Cayde. She can count on one hand the number of people who have seen her like that. Osiris was the first.)

              “Okay,” she says. “Now what?”

              He pushes her against the wall with abrupt roughness, hands on either side of her shoulders, kissing her down her neck to her collarbone. She can’t help but lean her head back, her eyes drifting shut.

              This, what he’s doing now, feels almost good.

              “Fuck me,” she says, her voice more breathless than she wants it to be.

              No one has touched her, either, since Cayde’s death, except in passing. (Well, that’s a lie, Lord Shaxx, in a moment of effusive sympathy, nearly crushed her to death in a hug. The lie feels more true, however, and she hates her body for it.) More importantly, Zavala hasn’t touched her since Cayde’s death.

              Even when she killed him, she thinks, his hands were still.

              It’s easy enough to push down her underpants. She’s still looking up at the ceiling, so she only feels and does not see him enter her.

              “Why?” she asks.

              He moves slowly, each thrust causing sparks in her vision. She’s stuck, thinking about her dead body and why this would even feel good, anymore. It takes Zavala all but biting her on the shoulder for her to refocus. This does feel good, even if she wants to cry.

              “You asked,” he answers.

              She does yell, when she orgasms, finally, with the help of one of Zavala’s blunt fingers on her clit. It could have been a name, once, but she bites her lips before the sounds can escape completely. Instead, she chants syllables of nothing as he groans, the first and only sound he makes.

              (Sometimes, one or both of them would let Cayde bring them off. It was always strange, mechanical even, something which made Cayde laugh when she said it.)

              “Sleep with me,” Ikora says. She doesn’t want him to go; she doesn’t bother getting dressed again.

              “We just did that,” he says. “We can do it again, but…” He shrugs.

              She shakes her head. “No,” she says. “I mean sleep as in rest.” The next three words force themselves out of her mouth before she can stop them, exactly. “I miss you.” She doesn’t expect him to start crying, soundless sobs wracking his body. He covers his face with his hands.

              “Please,” he says. He lets her lead him to her room.

              The sobs subside sooner than later, and Ikora falls asleep in his arms.

              He’s even there when she wakes up.

**Author's Note:**

> I am never writing the word "flaccid" in a fanfic again.   
> Thanks to a cis dude friend of mine for correcting some assumptions I had about anatomy :P
> 
> Please kudos and/or leave a review, it warms my cold, dead heart.


End file.
